A24 is probably one of the most irreverent film studios out there today. Them and NEON have taken the studio system to another level. They’ve distributed all kinds of quirky, weird and off the wall kinds of films. They’ve even made filmmakers like Barry Jenkins, Damian Chazelle and Greta Gerwig, and many others into names that film fans look forward to seeing their next movies. For all the pluses that A24 has under their umbrella like Eighth Grade, The Florida Project, and Past Lives They’ve got the occasional stinker as well, such Men. The less said about that, the better. I think you can add another stinker to the list in Friendship. It wasn’t very friendly to me while I was watching it.

Craig (Tim Robinson) is a normal guy who works a 9 to 5 job. He’s married to a pretty wife, Tami (Kate Mara), who runs a florist business out of their home, and they have a son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer). At first glance, they seem like a normal family.  While delivering a package that was sent to their home accidentally,  Craig starts a conversation with the new neighbor up the street Austni (Paul Rudd), which eventually starts a burgeoning friendship between the pair. What starts out as guys being guys hanging out having drinks and shooting the crap about life and work ends up becoming a nightmare for the Rudd character. The Robinson character ends up being socially inept, and people pretty much hate being around him.

I get the idea of writing/directing a film about an awkward odd guy who makes every situation he’s in weird for those around him, but this film takes the idea to another level.  The director, Andrew DeYoung, puts the viewer in  the position of seeing this guy be a complete jerk for two hours.  Every situation he’s in, he makes it worse. He walks through screen glass doors, he turns every gathering into a hatefest because of the dumb and idiotic things he says, and he doesn’t get along with any of his coworkers. The worst of all is that he mistreats his wife and  doesn’t know how to interact on an intelligent level with his teenage son. He’s the worst kind of person imaginable. Why make a movie about this character? That’s the question I was asking myself the entire time I was watching this movie.  It doesn’t make any sense why this movie exists.

Now, at the screening, I was at people were laughing at this film. They laughed at the dumb things this man said, the annoying things he did and many of the awkward situations that were presented for the audience to watch. I just just sat there shaking my head or with my hand in my face, wondering when this movie was going to end so I could leave. Even the post-film Q & A was a trainwreck. People kept watching it, though. I understand work is work and the actors took the roles because it’s a job, but I can’t honestly think they thought this was some kind of intelligently written thought-provoking story they had to be a part of. It was just a waste of two hours of my time. I can’t imagine all the time these people wasted making this.

There are two things that came to mind while I was watching this movie besides what my feelings were that I already expressed.  The fist is this. There are a lot of socially inept men and women in the world. People who just can’t be opposite in group settings or gatherings like family situations. They are just not capable of doing so. Whether that is a medical condition or something else remains to be seen. This is just the way of the world. So, to celebrate awkwardness,  shyness or ineptitude is in bad taste from my perspective. Why shed light on these types of people? All you’re going to do is make fun of them and make them feel worse than they already do. That is, if they, in fact, know their weird, odd, and awkward ones. It’s in bad taste all the way around.

The second point I’ll make is this. There have been many films before with actors playing weird or off the wall type characters. Jim Carrey,  Adam Sandler, Jerry Lewis, Will Ferrel,  and Jack Black, to name a handful,  have made careers playing these kinds of people in many of their films. People laugh outrageously at many of these movies. More often than not, these are crafted as fictional stories and taken as satire. This film, on the other hand, is presented as a realistic story even though the Robinson character is way over the top. Because he is so obviously over the top; it doesn’t work as satire. It just came across as mean-spirited and downright awful to me. That’s coming from a person who may be an awkward person in group settings or family gatherings. So, I may have a little experience in dealing with these types of situations in my time.

Paul Rudd is an actor I greatly admire and I’ve enjoyed his work in the Anchorman films, the MCU as Scott Lang/Ant Man and most recently the reboot of the Ghistbusters franchise and Death of a Unicorn. He has an interesting personality on screen. He tends to play the straight guy to someone else’s comedic stylings. Here, he does the same opposite Robinson. He plays the guy whose life is being ruined by this weird man who won’t leave him alone. We are supposed to sympathize with him, but I just felt like he was an enabler who let things get out of hand and ended up getting caught in the middle. He’s as much at fault for everything that happens as much as Robinson ‘s character is. Friends shouldn’t treat friends this way. Even if they don’t want to be friends anymore. I wasn’t a fan of this particular Rudd performance. 

Friendship left me sad and mad, and everything I don’t want to feel except happiness. While the audience I was sitting with was laughing at all the hijinks, I was just shaking my head and feeling bad that I had to sit there and be endured by this terrible example of awkward behavior. This is a type of illness of phylogenetic personality.  It doesn’t deserve to be made fun of on this level. I didn’t like either of the main performances by Robinson or Rudd. They both played characters I despised. Neither one of them had any redeeming qualities. In the end, that’s the main problem with this film. The characters weren’t people I wanted to watch for two hours. I didn’t need to be reminded of my own potential social inadequacies.  I’m sure a lot of others won’t be either. This movie isn’t a satire on odd or weird people. It’s a slap in the face to them treating them badly. I can’t abide by that. I didn’t laugh once at the obscurity of this film. I hate saying this, but this movie doesn’t deserve the audience it’s going to get. A24 should be ashamed to put their name on such a shallow meanspirited film like this.

½ star

Dan Skip Allen